A more ancient – and more recent – faith

Those of us who struggle to find our way toward Christ—skeptical, on one hand, of systematic theology’s historic ties to transient cultural outlooks, and, on the other, of equally momentary (but welcome) new epistemology flooding western culture—are starving for ways to understand what our faith really even is.

My friend Nancy (who, with others, writes at a snazzy new blog called The Echo Chamber) came across these thoughtful words from How (Not) To Speak of God* by Peter Rollins at Emerging Nazarenes. If such thoughts are your cup of tea, see how this one tastes:

“Here I picture the emerging community as a significant part of a wider religious movement which rejects both absolutism and relativism as idolatrous positions which hide their human origins in the modern myth of pure reason. …Instead of following the Greek-influenced idea of orthodoxy as right belief, the emerging community is helping us to rediscover the more Hebraic and mystical notion of the orthodox Christian as one who believes in the right way—that is, believing in a loving, sacrificial and Christlike manner. The reversal … from ‘right belief’ to ‘believing in the right way’ is in no way a move to some binary opposite of the first (for the opposite of right belief is simply wrong belief); rather, it is a way of transcending the binary altogether. Thus orthodoxy is not longer (mis)understood as opposite of heresy but rather is understood as a term that signals a way of being in the world rather than a means of believing things about the world.”

Seems helpful to me, urging us not back to assent to the “right” doctrinal planks (being mostly post-medieval creations), but back back, to roots closer to the passions of Jesus himself: becoming whole and helpful people.

*Listen to this excerpt from Publishers’ Weekly, found at Amazon: “Rollins summarizes some of the theological ideas that the so-called emerging church is currently exploring: the importance of doubt and silence, the limits of apologetics, and the idea that God is concealed even as God is revealed. He skillfully scrutinizes Christian teaching though the lens of postmodern (especially deconstructionist) theory, and argues that Christians should both affirm their views of God and recognize that those views are inadequate.”